Week 13

When Esther first got pregnant this time, I had this dream about a baby boy named Oscar. I woke up pretty convinced that the baby in Esther’s belly was a boy. The next night I had a dream about this magically swimming baby that we adopted from Japan, and her name was Japanese for Waterlily. I watched this 3 month old swimming laps in a festive Japanese swim meet for babies and I had my first pang of, “that’s my kid!” parental pride that I’ve ever experienced. Still, despite the dream, the first dream seemed to be stronger in truthiness, and I stuck to the prediction that the baby was a boy.

Now, the whole reason I decided to predict the gender and stick with it with utter conviction is because I’m totally not a believer in the “I had a feeling it was going to be a boy” intuition. Okay, I believe the intuition exists, I just don’t think it’s any more accurate than randomness. So, I thought it would be fun to play the opposite role and be totally certain it was a boy. Plus, it seems like a fatherly thing to do. Am I overthinking this? Yes. But it’s just how my brain works.

Anyway, I also love gender prediction rituals, superstitions, and the like. The Chinese gender prediction chart claims it will be a boy. Our acupuncturist says it’s a boy. That little ring on a string thing says it’s a boy. And now Esther herself has the intuition that it’s a boy.

Do people live inside billboards? (there was a sign near our house for the county jail or something, which I was sure was the actual jail itself, and somehow people could be in jail inside a sign… it was weird)

I feel a whole lot better suddenly. It’s as if someone flipped off the switch to my nausea button and logged off my 12 hours a night sleep account. This is good.

I was able this morning to go to a yoga class for the first time in 3 weeks. I only felt a little bit dizzy and a little bit pukey for a little bit of time. Mostly, I delighted in stretching all my stagnating muscles out. I am impressed that this body is still holding some limber qualities after 2 months of barely working out. I suppose that those 8 years of yogafication don’t really leave after 3 months of babification. Thank goodness. Keep up the good work, body!

One thing that I am noticing when I do make it to yoga class is a sense of baby awareness that is far more abstract when, say, I’m at work. I feel accountable in my practice to keep as much oxygen and blood flowing to my uterus as possible, which requires all of these tweaks to my posturing, thus ushering in a maintained hour-long baby awareness. There is no longer a set intention that resides outside my body. I admit that I’m not praying for peace, praying for my family, or praying to the sun. I am, rather, singing this physical baby making song and trying to sing in the tune of an aware woman.

Odd to notice that even after three weeks without practice, my balance seems to have improved. Don’t get me wrong, my balance was never good to begin with. I still fell out of half moon during my practice today. But, usually, after 3 weeks of absolute neglect, I can barely hold half moon without shaking and quaking. Today was different. I was steady, strong, grounded. This could be due to my recent long-term sobriety and vast hydration. Or it could be something more profound, which is what my emotional, hormone-driven, yoga-high mind is currently preferring. I’m not sure what this sense of the profound can be named. I guess I’m not that sage.

I’ve been reading a lot of pregnancy blogs as well as new parenting blogs (20 in my RSS folder at the moment), and the phrase, “they never tell you X” keeps coming up. I’m terrified of whatever it is that will fit into the “they never told me X” category for me, because I’m reading so much and they are telling me so much that it’ll be interesting to see what exactly it is that slips through the cracks. I can’t even imagine. And I guess that’s the point. Yikes!

I guess you’re a fetus still, and you’ll become a baby when you graduate from the womb. Still, fetus is pretty cool. I was a fetus once. I don’t remember much about it, probably because my neurons weren’t connected yet and whatever memories were sitting in my blobby little head got rolled over by the crazy mob of neurons that developed every corner of my cranium in the first couple years of being a baby.

You’ll get there.

Right now you’re developing teeth, I hear, and your eyes are closing (now that they have lids) and won’t open again until you see that crazy light-at-the-beginning-of-the-tunnel in the room of your first graduation. I’m learning about eyes all over again in my book. Rods, cones, the fact that your subconscious starts seeing things before your frontal-lobe does, the fact that the way to determine “where” the things you’re seeing grows separately from the part that determines “what” you’re seeing. Reading these books is fun, it passes the time. But mostly I just want to know what you’re doing right now.

I have this weird desire to write you songs on my guitar. It might be my first “Dad-impulse”. No, that’s not true, I did also try to talk to you once, through Esther’s belly. But then I remembered you can’t really hear yet, but you can feel sounds, so I said really low mumbly words. Hope you felt it.

We are also tossing around a lot of baby names. You know, it’s difficult because we don’t know if you’re a boy or a girl. So I tend to like the unisex names right now, cause they just work. I thought of one today that I haven’t told Esther yet. We’ll see. Names don’t last very long here. We might have to change your name every year. Maybe we’ll give you 18 names, one that you peel off every year, and then you can choose your own. Would you sue us if we did that?

I should simplify these letters to you. It’s not like I’m writing to your 10-year old self yet. It’s maybe a little rude to use words that you won’t understand for a while. But I am not a big fan of baby talk. In fact, I plan on talking to you like a regular person from the get-go. That’s my plan. Who knows if there’s some weird drug they give you at the hospital that makes you revert to a baby-talking parent whenever you’re around babies. I mean, words are words, right? And you’re not going to understand anything anyway, so why give it a high-pitched tone with lots of fluffy vowels?

81-year-old Sendak is my king is because of what he said during a recent Newsweek interview that was intended to promote the film but no doubt wound up offending parents all over the country. It went like this:

Reporter: “What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?”

Sendak: “I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I will not tolerate.”

Reporter: “Because kids can handle it?”

Sendak: “If they can’t handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.”

Sendak: “This concentration on kids being scared, as though we as adults can’t be scared. Of course we’re scared. I’m scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can’t fall asleep. It never stops. We’re grown-ups; we know better, but we’re afraid.”

Reporter: “Why is that important in art?”

Sendak: “Because it’s truth. You don’t want to do something that’s all terrifying. I saw the most horrendous movies that were unfit for child’s eyes. So what? I managed to survive.”

Remember, this guy is 81 years old. I miss the way people used to be. A couple of generations ago, parents didn’t worry about whether kids were happy all the time or comfortable 24/7 or wrapped in protective coating. Of course, they didn’t want their children hurt. But it’s hard to imagine they would have spent much time and effort trying to keep kids from being scared.

Quite the contrary, they used to tell them scary stories at bedtime or on camping trips — usually the kind intended to frighten little ones into behaving correctly. “And then one day, all the kids who didn’t listen to their mommies and daddies just disappeared. …”

I get it. We really, really, really like our children. In fact, we love our children and we think they’re the most precious little darlings ever created, and so naturally we want to protect them. And we should protect them from some things — predators, disease, abuse, etc. But we shouldn’t protect them from all things. And we certainly can’t protect them from life. And part of life is getting scared now and then. In time, we learn to separate reality from fantasy.

And yet, while one infamous set of parents could face criminal charges for pretending their son was in a balloon, other parents think nothing of keeping their kids in a bubble.

Esther sent me the link to this article yesterday and I think we’re in agreement that Sendak is on to something here.

On Oct 24, at the stroke of midnight, Esther entered the second trimester of her pregnancy. That also happened to be the night of her birthday party, so we took the opportunity to tell people that night (if they hadn’t figured it out by themselves).

I’m glad it’s public now. It’s difficult to be so excited about something that you can’t share with the people you usually like to share things you’re excited about with. Now we can!